Skip to main content
All CollectionsMarketing Lists
How to use the List Cleaner
How to use the List Cleaner

Learn about List cleaner, email deliverability risks it helps identify and how to use it with Nexl Engage

Habib Ullah avatar
Written by Habib Ullah
Updated over 5 months ago

One of the main reasons why email accuracy is crucial is because it directly affects your deliverability rates. Deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to reach the recipient's inbox. If your email addresses are not accurate, your emails may bounce or end up in the spam folder, resulting in a low deliverability rate. This can significantly impact the success of your email marketing campaigns and communication efforts. Several common issues can affect the accuracy of your email addresses and, in turn, your deliverability rates. These include disposable email addresses, role-based addresses, and misspellings. Our new List Cleaner feature helps to detect the contacts with potential email deliverability issues so that you can remove them before sending any marketing emails. This will ensure high email deliverability and better domain reputation.

How to access and use the Clean List feature

What can you do with List cleaner

The List Cleaner can help you remove contacts that high risk for deliverability, bounced emails, contacts that have unsubscribed, unengaged or have not provided consent.

Risk Status

The List Cleaner will categorise lists into three risk categorise or statuses:

  • Low – An address that is likely authentic and sending to it carries a low risk of damaging your reputation. For instance, an address from a well-known domain (like hotmail.com or gmail.com) is likely to be valid and sending to it poses a low risk to your reputation.

  • Medium – The baseline state for risk assessment is medium risk. Any address not identified as low or high risk will be assigned a medium risk by default.

  • High – An address that poses a substantial risk to the sender's reputation. This may include potential disposable emails, support emails, and contacts that have moved roles such that the email is not valid anymore

Result

Based on the risk status, the list cleaner will assign email deliverability result to each email. Following are the results and description of the results:

Result

Description

deliverable

The recipient address is considered to be valid and should accept email.

undeliverable

The recipient address is considered to be invalid and will result in a bounce if sent to.

do_not_send

The recipient address is considered to be highly risky and will negatively impact sending reputation if sent to.

catch_all

The validity of the recipient address cannot be determined as the provider accepts any and all email regardless of whether or not the recipient's mailbox exists.

unknown

The validity of the recipient address cannot be determined for a variety of potential reasons. Please refer to the associated 'reason' array returned in the response.

Reason

The List cleaner will also provide the reason behind the result. Here is the list of reasons behind each list cleaner result and the corresponding description of the reason:

Reason

Description

unknown_provider

The MX provider is an unknown provider.

no_mx / No MX host found

The recipient domain does not have a valid MX host. Note: this reason will be consolidated to only "no\mx" in the future.

high_risk_domain

Information obtained about the domain indicates it is high risk to send email to.

subdomain_mailer

The recipient domain is identified to be a subdomain and is not on our exception list. Subdomains are considered to be high risk as many spammers and malicious actors utilize them.

immature_domain

The domain is newly created based on the WHOIS information.

tld_risk

The domain has a top-level-domain (TLD) that has been identified as high risk.

mailbox_does_not_exist

The mailbox is undeliverable or does not exist.

mailbox_is_disposable_address

The mailbox has been identified to be a disposable address. Disposable address are temporary, generally one time use, addresses.

mailbox_is_role_address

The mailbox is a role based address (ex. support@…, marketing@…).

catch_all

The validity of the recipient address cannot be determined as the provider accepts any and all email regardless of whether or not the recipient's mailbox exists.

long_term_disposable

The mailbox has been identified as a long term disposable address. Long term disposable addresses can be quickly and easily deactivated by users, but they will not expire without user intervention.

failed custom grammar check

The mailbox failed our custom ESP local-part grammar check.

mailbox_quota_exceeded

The mailbox is full and cannot accept more mail.

smtp_error

An error was returned while attempting to validate the address.

smtp_timeout

The MX host did not respond within our expected timeframe.

How to use the Clean List feature with Nexl Engage

If you are using Nexl Engage, our Email management system, you will be automatically warned when sending an email to a recipient list that is not verified through List Clenaer. You can choose to skip it, in which case email will be sent. If you choose to verify the list, we will not send the email to contacts with high risk emails. You may still see the high risk emails in the list as we will not remove them from the list.


Frequently Asked Questions

Why are some emails already populated with risk data before verifying the list

Once a clean list action is done on contact emails, we store the verification results for those contacts for 30days. Some contacts may belong to multiple lists which could have been cleaned before. The emails that have risk data before performing any verification are part of those lists that have been cleaned

Did this answer your question?